“The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms reports that Iranian authorities’ reaffirmed a death sentence for Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani for the sole reason of his refusal to recant his Christian faith.”

I hope it is merely sloppy writing that makes this condemnation so Islamic: Neither the death sentence nor its reaffirmation is condemned. These actions are okay. What is condemned is the reporting.

Crusader: Your comment above adds to the myth of the moderate Muslim - the idea that Muslims in Iran - and elsewhere - would and could change if non-Muslims give Muslims the chance to change.

In reality, Muslims are PERFECTLY happy being Muslims because being Muslims gives them the chance to be supremacist rulers over their own women and children - and all non-Muslims.

While ordinary Iranians may be desperate for regime change, it is inconceivable that generations of Muslims are indeed desperate for religious change.

Iran had the chance to divest of Islam at at least one historical period in its history, and yet Iranian Muslims freely chose to stay Muslim.

In any case, Muslims who worship Satanic Allah realize the harm that other people's actions cause them but refuse to admit the harm that they cause to others. So, Muslims want to change the part of Islam that is inconvenient to them without abandoning the parts of Islam that benefit them. Thus, Muslims complain of Muslim poverty without being willing to allow personal freedom and creative expression that leads to wealth.

Muslims see the negative results of their religion without blaming their religion - but displacing blame for their own failure onto successful non-Muslims.

There are enough Iranians who have put their lives on the line (and enough more who mourn those who have laid down their lives) for the sake of resisting totalitarianism that I have to dispute the idea that whatever that indicates is just a "myth".

I personally don't think it says anything about their desire to be Muslim other than that perhaps individual Iranians have free will and might change their religion if they had the option.

Again, Chiu, you need to provide a legitimate citation when you make these authoritative proclamations.

The idea that Iranians prefer Islam is clear because they have been practicing it for centuries - even when given the chance to abandon Islam under non-Muslim leaders.

The idea that Iranians would be willing and able to embrace Western values is speculative at best - and dangerous at worst.

It is revealing that Iran WAS a pseudo-Western country until it regressed back to its hard-core Islamic roots - just as we have seen recently with Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Syria and Jordan are next on the list to regress.

It appears far easier for Muslim countries to regress to militant Islam than to join civilization.

Iranians who rebel merely rebel against a certain set of leaders rather than Islam itself.

So you're saying that, at some point, Iran was being ruled by non-Muslims (rather than "less-fanatical-Muslims")?

But there is no chance at all that such a state of affairs could be brought about again, and it is simply impossible that there are any Iranians who would be willing to become non-Muslims even if it did?

I have to say that I don't necessarily see how those two assertions can be reconciled.

News flash, it's easier for pretty much everyone to revert to barbarism rather than embrace Western values. You yourself occasionally provide a pretty good example of that. Still, plenty of ex-Muslims have left Islam, which is why Islamic clerics get so hyper about forbidding any form of proselyting and why there has to be an actively enforced death penalty for apostasy.

As they say, actions speak louder than words. Islam fears openness and freedom because they know perfectly well that many Muslims would choose some other religion if they were offered a real choice. Muslims living in those few places where they can leave Islam without danger prove it.

If we're willing to hold individuals personally accountable for their own crimes, without excusing them because of their religious background, then perhaps we can see if it is the religious indoctrination or the lack of personal consequences for criminal behavior that have the greater tendency to induce criminality. I do accept that ideological justifications for criminal actions play a role in most crime. But the vast majority of criminals evidently thought they would "get away with it", as evidenced by their efforts to avoid being caught and punished.

Chiu: Personal insults such as those that you direct at me are a total failure of your honor and intellect. It makes me think less of your upbringing if your parents taught you to debate issues with such personal vindictiveness - a non-Western value from someone who claims to value Western values.

Yes, Chiu. I am saying that, at some point in antiquity, Islamic Iran became ruled by non-Muslims, but Muslims under that non-Muslim rule still chose to remain Muslim in Iran.

Unfortunately, Iran reverted back to Islam when a non-Muslim prince married a Muslima and converted to Islam - and then instituted Islamic rule in Iran again.

I looked for the citation last night and was unable to find it again, but I remember reading about the situation and being totally shocked because Iran had ESCAPED Islamic rule for hundreds of years - and then voluntarily returned to Islamic rule.

The point of the author was that no one can make the claim that you and Crusader make which is that Muslims, given the chance, would stop being and acting Muslim.

And, the chief indicator of acting Muslim is pursuing power over all others until that power is fully realized - even if it takes many hundreds of years.

This is precisely WHY civilized society MUST permanently outlaw Islam - because Islam is patient and always waiting to revive its despotic rule.

In any case, your argument is weak that Muslims have NO free will to choose Islam. Perhaps Muslims DO indeed have free will to choose Islam and simply make the wrong choice.

It is time for Westerners to start treating Muslims like adults who bear grave moral responsibility for their own evil choices.

I doubt that 'plenty' of Muslims have left Islam. How about your providing us with a source for your claim?

Even if 'plenty' of Muslims have left Islam, those ex-Muslims are irrelevant to the problems caused by the existence of BILLIONS of committed criminal Muslims....

Personal insults such as those that you direct at me are a total failure of your honor and intellect. It makes me think less of your upbringing if your parents taught you to debate issues with such personal vindictiveness - a non-Western value from someone who claims to value Western values.

Or so I might say, but I never particularly thought about your upbringing in the first place. I guess it's nice that you probably had one?

On the historical measure, I think that you're going all the way back to before Persia was ever Muslim in the first place. Though, to be perfectly honest, the Persians did a lot of bad things before they became Muslim. Then again, most nations have done bad things, and very few of the worst things ever done had anything to do with Islam other than having happened on the same planet.

Your idea that Islam is the only expression of anti-civilization values that ever existed explains a lot about the things that you keep saying. But it's simply not usefully true. You've defined Islam as "everything that is opposed to what is right", and based on that definition, most of your assertions make sense.

The problem is that the definition doesn't really make that much sense because Islam really does refer to a particular ideological movement started by a particular person well after much of the world's history had already happened. Not only that, but Islam remained quite local for a long time, because it was predominantly dependent on conquest.

Chiu: I believe that there is a distinct difference between your immature insults and name calling and my rightly expecting you to provide references for proclamations that are your personal opinion that you represent as fact.

First of all, Islam has always been an expansionist movement.

Second of all, the ONLY thing that stopped Islam from expanding into the West was 1) all-out knock-down drag-out wars, and 2) a complete ban of all Islam from the West throughout all of history - until now.

Third of all, at no point in time has any other civilization invited - and willingly subsidized - the invasion of enough Muslims to quickly overwhelm the numbers of their native population.

So, while the march of Islam has been slow until now, the West is aggressively importing Islam into the West in a most non-Darwinian manner.

Evil Islam has enslaved, tortured, and murdered MORE people over MORE time than any other ideology.

Evil Marxism (including Nazism) has tortured and murdered MORE people over a SHORTER period of time than any other ideology.

Enslavement, torture, and murder has always existed; however, the ideologies of Islam and Marxism have industrialized enslavement, torture, and murder on a greater scope and scale than any former ideologies, governments, or humans.

I also see a distinct difference between my "immature insults and name calling" and you "rightly expecting [me] to provide references for proclamations that are [my] personal opinion that [I] represent as fact.

Of course, the differences are mostly swallowed up in the essential similarity, that those events are all things that mainly take place in your imagination.

Even without combining Communism with it's various Marxist/socialist ideological cousins, it has put up some really impressive numbers in a very short time. And some of the currently not-as-bloodthirsty Far East religions have had more time and population base to accrue a bit of guilt. So perhaps it would be useful to put together some really rigorous statistics on who exactly really has the highest body count.

"Our century is noted for its absolute and bloody wars. World War I saw nine-million people killed in battle, an incredi ble record that was far surpassed within a few decades by the 15 million battle deaths of World War II. Even the number killed in twentieth century revolutions and civil wars have set historical records. In total, this century's battle killed in all its international and domestic wars, revolutions, and violent conflicts is so far about 35,654,000."

"Yet, even more unbelievable than these vast numbers killed in war during the lifetime of some still living, and largely unknown, is this shocking fact. This century's total killed by absolutist governments already far exceeds that for all wars, domestic and international. Indeed, this number already approximates the number that might be killed in a nuclear war."

It is totalitarianism that commits democide against its own people as well as genocide against others, and Islam has been totalitarian for longer than any other form of government - and thus Islam has tortured and murdered more people over more time than Marxism which has used technology to make up for lost time. The fear is that Islam will obtain advanced technology and act like murderous Marxism on steroids.

P.S. Marxism is the accurate name for all of the other -isms such as Socialism, Fascism, Communism, etc. - which are all really just flavors of Marxism.

"But what connects them all is this. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted."

"Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme of democide. Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin's reign or the height of Mao's power) has taken place when they have been in their own history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply."

"Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy."

"But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power."

Unfortunately, this does not logically quite hold together. The horrendous sacrifice to Marxist ideology would only demonstrate (but does not quite prove) that no Marxist can be trusted with power, while the similar massacres in the service of various other totalitarian schemes could be taken as a few additional points of induction, and always towards the idea that totalitarians cannot be trusted with power.

Real proof ultimately has to be deductive in nature. As such, it is always subject to challenge based on validity of premise or logic, but once the premises and reasoning are accepted, a person can have confidence of the result.

For me, life is most usefully defined as a condition of freedom. The tendency of a ruler to deprive people of life is a direct outgrowth of the ruler's attitude towards their freedom. Attempts to deprive people of freedom, even based directly on the notion of thus preserving their lives, will result in deaths at the hand of the rulers.

So the problem is not that nobody can be trusted with power, the problem is that nobody that could be trusted with it has any use for such power. Only those committed to the idea of people deciding things for themselves will not resort to using power to take the lives of those who are too insistent on freedom. But you don't need to use a lot of power to let people decide things for themselves, if you're really committed to freedom.

The condition of freedom consists of three elements. First, there is the possibility of different actions on the part of a given person. Second, those different actions will lead to divergent consequences that are meaningfully different to the person whose actions bring them about. Third, that person must have some ability to predict which actions will lead to which consequences.

To the degree that a person is lacking any one of these three elements, freedom is impaired. To conscientiously value freedom implies concern with identifying the element lacking, which may leave a given person less able to enact their own destiny. In certain rare cases, it is the direct power of voluntary action that has become impaired. More commonly, the natural consequences that would normally be associated with certain actions have been foreclosed so that people who embark on an action that would bring about a natural result instead encounter an artificial result.

But the main problem of freedom remains knowledge, and it is here that we can most easily see whether a person is committed to freedom.